Victor
Sanchez
Victor Sanchez is a Mexican
researcher personal and creator of The Art of Living Purposefully. He
gives workshops worldwide on the teachings described in his books, The
Teachings of Don Carlos; Toltecs of the New Millennium; The Toltec Path
of Recapitulation: Heal Your Past to Free Your Soul; and The Toltec
Oracle.
From his adventures in
the natural world, he sees the reencounter with that world as the ideal
space within which to reencounter our natural self. In his work, this
encounter with Nature is not an intellectual approximation; it is participation
of the body and an ecology that comes from the heart, which is expressed
through a way of living. From his experience with indigenous groups in
Mexico - survivors who keep alive the spiritual traditions of the ancient
Toltecs - he brings us a message: We are children of the Sun, our nature
is to shine and, as double beings, we must reincorporate into our daily
lives the awareness of the other self that lies hidden inside us, waiting
to be resurrected. His message is not directed to the sphere of thinking;
rather it points to the realm of experiences. Above all, his work is
an invitation for us to get away from thinking and talking about knowledge,
and instead to begin to live it in our body and our heart. Victor is
working to create a bridge that allows people to nourish themselves with
the magic that is preserved among indigenous communities of Toltec descent,
a magic that holds one of the most priceless and powerful treasures ever
generated by human experience on this Earth: the knowledge of the otherness.
www.toltecas.com
Tuesday, January 25
The Shamanic Leap: The Role of True Shamanism in the Future of Humanity
- Victor Sanchez -
Ballroom 9:00am to 10:15am
While Shamanism is often considered as related to the past of humanity,
and religion a step ahead into the future of humanity, the development
of human history is showing us that the real trend is just the opposite.
The loss of the shamanic for most communities in the world, which took
place through the advent of the major organized religions, brought upon
us conflict and separation from nature, from other peoples and nations,
and from each other. In this perspective, history shows that the advent
of major religions, based on the fear of God and the discriminatory understanding
of doctrines of love, has been the advent of religious values-based wars.
Examples are the Christian crusades, the violent expansion of Islam,
the conflicts in the Middle East and the US invasion of Iraq.
The concept
of Good vs. Evil present at the core of major religions is at the core
of the international, interpersonal and individual inner conflicts as
well.
Paradoxically,
the shamanic experience brings back a sense of connectedness and takes
us into a world where opposites are not enemies but are meant to be together.
This is why, far from being a matter of a forgotten past, shamanism is
at the core of the next step in human evolution: a matter of having a
chance to stop the self-destructive tendency dominating both the international
affairs and the individual perception of oneself. It is a matter of survival.
However,
to fully understand the value of the shamanic experience, we need to
overcome a major misunderstanding widely spread about it: the fantasy
that shamanism is primarily and mostly a shaman-only endeavor, which
the rest of us can only watch from afar.
Explore:
-The difference between religion and shamanism and their influence on
personal and global evolution.
-The Master Movement that goes from the painful antagonism of conflicting
opposites to the beauty of complementary opposites.
-The Toltec vision for human evolution.
-Shamanism as a personal experience rather than something to be performed
by someone else, and
-The core elements of the shamanic experience and how we can develop
them and integrate them into our own lives.
Tuesday, January 25
Shamanism beyond Shamans: How to Activate Your Shamanic Awareness
by Yourself
- Victor Sanchez -
Ballroom 2:00pm to 4:30pm
The main topic of this workshop is providing participants with an outline
of how to integrate shamanic experiences into their own lives, without
needing a shaman.
One of
the main proposals of Victor Sanchez' work is that shamanism is much
too important to leave just in the hands of shamans.
In shamanic
societies from the past and from ones that still exist, the shaman plays
the roll of a supporter that provides the space and helps us develop
our own ways to achieve our sacred connection with the Spirit. It is
only in the context of the western mind with its emphasis on personal
leadership and individual worship that we enter into the fantasy of the
shaman as the one who makes the shamanic experience possible. Within
this misunderstanding, we often miss the main point of shamanism: that
it takes place when we are living the experience by ourselves.
Shamanism
belongs to all humanity and to every single human being. The shamanic
experience is the intimate connection between us and the Great Spirit
which takes place only when we re-engage our capacity to move from the
realm of reason into the realm of silent knowledge.
In this
perspective, the shaman is optional but our own personal responsibility
and appropriate actions are not. Once we learn how to make the shamanic
leap by ourselves, we can enter there either in solitude or in the shared
vision of a community experience.
This program
is about reclaiming the shamanic experience as our own.
